Chapter 7 #2
Tell me something significant, Axel says. We’ll talk again after we’ve gone to look for bondable humans and returned.
Euphrasia circles twice, and then drops to the floor, her head resting on her feet.
You may not have witnessed it yet, but Odin the boor and Freya the fresh-faced vanir looking to change the world wind up spending a lot of time together.
They were the only two ‘dragons’ as you call us who could take a human form.
In trying to figure out what had happened, they fell in love.
It was a pretty epic love story, and frankly it gave them both hope that they might change the vanir.
They wanted to end the war and save the earth children—humans as you call them—who so often became the collateral damage.
But what happened? Why didn’t their plans work?
“In my dream, we were aided in our escape from the vanir by a moon vanir and her bonded. They were happy together, and it made me wonder if maybe they weren’t the monsters we thought.” In fact, the thought of poor Nótt being stuck in that volcano makes me a little ill.
You were quite taken with the moon vanir and her bonded in that time as well. Euphrasia’s smirk annoys me.
“What does that mean?”
You and the earth child bonded to Nótt wed. She glances at Azar.
His eyes widen, and his nostrils flare. They what?
“Let’s focus,” I say. “The vanir weren’t so bad, right? Some of them helped, and notably, Odin and Freya both worked to try and change the vanir’s plan of forcibly bonding humans. Why didn’t it work? We’d also taken the heart, which should have weakened Bjorn.”
Repairing age-old feuds takes time, Euphrasia says. And a lot of power. The vanir, and most importantly, Freya’s father, felt forsaken by her. They were angry. Angrier than before. Their attacks became more frequent, and more vicious than ever.
That’s not great to hear.
And to make matters worse, over more than a decade, Freya laid countless eggs, but none of them ever hatched.
I blink. I knew Azar had lots of brothers, but. . . “Was that common?”
We thought it was because she was an ice vanir and Odin was a flame aesir. We’d never heard of such a pair. We weren’t sure if the eggs ever could hatch.
That’s not good either.
Freya spent more and more time with the heart, looking for answers. From the time you found it and brought it, only Odin and Freya were able to shift into humans, and you were the only earth child gifted with wings, other than your children.
Children? Azar looks ready to roast something.
“You weren’t even alive then!” I point at Euphrasia. “Can you focus?”
He can’t seem to stop glaring at me.
Euphrasia stands and begins to pace, which she can’t do much of in the smallish space. Meanwhile, Freya’s efforts to win vanir over to our side were causing a lot of aesir to doubt Odin and the ongoing legitimacy of his rule, given he was in love with the enemy.
Maybe humans and dragons aren’t all that different.
Most of the opposition came from Odin and Frigg’s other offspring. They never liked that Odin mated with the sister of Frigg’s killer.
“Frigg killed Freyr too,” I say. “That’s a pretty unfair double standard.”
The blessed don’t worry about fairness. Axel looks utterly serious.
No, Euphrasia agrees. They do not. And as more eggs were laid by Odin and Freya and still none hatched, the other aesir began to agree that there might be something wrong with a pairing between a vanir and an aesir. Freya spent more and more time with the heart and her eggs, looking for answers.
“Did the vanir keep attacking?”
Euphrasia sighs. They did, and Bjorn seemed to be creating more eggs and raising more offspring than ever. Rumors grew and expanded, that Bjorn had sent Freya and Gullveig to bewitch Odin. There began to be attacks on all three of you. She’s looking at me.
“And I was the weak link,” I say.
You began to help her with experiments with the heart. You tried your best to draw out its magic and use it to hatch her eggs or help her lay a stronger one.
“What did they look like, the eggs?” I ask.
Flame blessed eggs are always scarlet, Axel says. Like our scales.
These weren’t regular flame blessed eggs, Euphrasia says. They weren’t ice vanir eggs, either. They were something else entirely. Some were nearly black. Some were red. One was purple. They were all iridescent, like the inside of a clamshell.
“Wait, so Axel’s egg—”
It hadn’t been laid yet, she says. It was the very last.
We’re almost out of time. Axel looks annoyed.
And I’m still in my pajamas. “We can hear the rest when we get back.”
Tell me something important. Something I should already know. He’s still upset, or maybe unsettled is a better description. The bond feels unsteady.
Their work with the heart was working to a certain degree, Euphrasia says.
Freya called frantically for Odin to come one day when she had used magic from the heart and channeled it into her very first egg.
But when she called him, Odin was with his son at the time.
Her eyes are hard. Thunar came with him.
Yep, this feels relevant.
The very first egg Freya had laid was rocking.
It looked close to hatching. It was the dark, nearly black egg, the first one she’d laid.
When Thunar saw what was happening, he was livid.
The only thing he could hate more than Freya was a child of Odin’s that was related to him.
. .and also to her. He exploded, releasing a torrent of flame that entirely subsumed the egg.
I swear under my breath. “That can’t have been good.”
Freya was holding the heart, and instead of attacking Thunar, she began to shake.
She looked entirely and completely possessed, like something else was controlling her body and her mind.
She began chanting, and she said, “This egg, the first hatched of flame, heir of the fire-king, shall herald the doom of all the sky-children, casting them back into a darkness that shall consume them for time and evermore.”
“Thunar burned up an egg?” I ask. “And Odin just let him?”
Odin attacked him and nearly killed him, Euphrasia says. But his other siblings came and begged Odin to spare him in memory of his mother.
“Still,” I say. “Did the egg survive?”
From that egg hatched Hyperion, Euphrasia says. And I hear the vanir were released into the world again because of him.
I can’t help wondering whether that’s what the prophecy meant. “That kind of thing is so vague. Like, what does that mean, ‘the doom of the sky-children’?”
What did his egg look like after Thunar burned it?
Euphrasia looks surprised that he asked. It was scarlet, just like it should have been all along, like he burned away all the anomalies.
“We’re going to be late,” Sammy calls. “We have to go.”
If he thinks he’s coming, he’s lost his mind. “Oh, no,” I say, marching out. “You can’t go. You’ve already bonded two dragons. You think I’m sending you alongside the other blessed so you can ‘save’ any more?”
Sammy rolls his eyes. “I’ve tried like ten more times, Liz. I can’t bond any more, clearly.”
He’s tried. . .I’m going to strangle him. With my bare hands.
“Please tell me you’re not really planning to wear that,” Coral says.
“I have a shirt you can wear,” Jade says. “If your clothes are all dirty. I don’t even care if you cut holes for your wings, and it’s way too big for me. Asteria brought back a lot of stuff, but most of it was the wrong size.”
In my defense, she looks very small, and so do all the human clothes. But Asteria’s eyeing my pajamas strangely too. Even though most of your clothing looks similar to us, even I can tell you’re not properly dressed for something important like this.
“Fine,” I shout. I stomp back inside my chambers, rummage through my dresser, and pull out the first thing I can find.
It’s an all black shirt and pants, and it makes my wings look unnecessarily dramatic, being all white as they are.
While I’m changing, Axel turns into Azar, so we’ll be black, white, and red.
But it’s fine. At least I’m no longer clad in flannel.
When I come back out, all the smiling, happy faces are gone. Thunar’s here, and he looks more than ready to go. Hearing about how he charred Hyperion as an egg didn’t endear me to him, and I hate being powerless even more than usual.